Lord C-J "We are at critical point for our democratic institutions: the time for voluntary codes has definitively passed"

As part of a Lib Dem debate day in the Lords I recently took part in the debate iniatiated by Lord Wallace of Saltaire that “this House takes note of the threats to democratic institutions in the United Kingdom, including disinformation, foreign interference, and levels of public trust in politics.”

It was a debate where there were a great many different points of view expressed. This is a slightly edited version of what I said

My noble friend reported that the Electoral Commission’s most recent survey found that only 14% of people trust politicians. The National Centre for Social Research reports record low levels of trust in how Britain is governed, with only 12% of the public trusting Governments to put the country’s interests before their party’s. That collapse does not exist in a vacuum. It is being actively engineered, and technology has become the primary instrument of that engineering.

In 2020, Lord Puttnam’s Select Committee described a “pandemic of misinformation” and disinformation that would result in the collapse of public trust. Six years on, the failure of successive Governments to act on the bulk of those 45 recommendations has had predictable consequences. The World Economic Forum now ranks misinformation and disinformation as the second most severe short-term risk facing the world, ahead of extreme weather events and state-based armed conflict.

That pandemic has been supercharged by AI. The Rycroft report concluded that

“our defences are worryingly weak”

and we are

“already experiencing ‘information warfare’”.

The Rycroft review was triggered by the sentencing of Nathan Gill, a former MEP, for accepting bribes linked to the Russian state. His case is not an isolated incident. It is a symptom of the systematic campaign. Transparency International’s research finds that one in 10 political donations already originates from unknown or dubious sources, a vulnerability made worse by the complete absence of any cap on political donations in the UK. His case is one that the strategic defence review characterises as a sub-threshold attack, falling beneath the threshold of war but an act of aggression none the less.

The Alan Turing Institute’s Centre for Emerging Technology and Security has monitored AI disinformation across more than 100 national elections. Domestic political actors created significant portions of misleading AI content. Threat actors embedded features of verified news sources to make fabrication harder to debunk. The tools get cheaper and faster with every cycle. Full Fact Report 2026 identifies the most insidious development: confusion has become the strategy—not one false claim, but sufficient uncertainty that trust in all information breaks down and citizens disengage from the ballot box entirely.

In this environment, the value of the BBC has never been clearer. It remains one of the most trusted news sources in the world, precisely because it is subject to obligations of impartiality and public accountability that no social media algorithm is required to meet. Contrary to what has been said in the debate today, it can be held to account to deliver on that duty. Undermining it, whether through funding pressure or through interference with board appointments, would hand a significant victory to those seeking to diminish or subvert our democracy. The charter renewal process gives us a direct opportunity to support it.

The Government’s own media Green Paper, published just this week, acknowledges that fewer than half of adults now feel confident judging whether a news source is truthful. It proposes new BBC responsibilities to counter disinformation and requiring platforms to make public service media news content prominent during elections and crises. I welcome both proposals.

The Social Market Foundation’s new report, No News is Bad News, quantifies what we have long feared. Over 4 million people now live in what is called a news desert, with 320 local publications closed since 2009. Areas with no local news have nearly three times the level of misinformation as those with a healthy press. These are not abstract statistics; they describe the conditions in which the next general election will be fought.

Briefly, what do we need? We need statutory cross-sector AI regulation, including mandatory AI watermarking of synthetic content. Voters cannot exercise informed judgment if they cannot distinguish real from fabricated. We need comprehensive electoral reform. Although the Elections Act 2022 introduced digital imprints, we still lack statutory advert libraries, and there are no rules whatever on deepfakes in political campaigning. The Representation of the People Bill must fill those gaps.

We must invest seriously in digital and media literacy. Internet Matters tells us that only half of young people feel confident assessing whether political information online is true. Over 60% simply ignore what politicians say online because they cannot trust what they see. That is not apathy but a rational response to a systematically untrustworthy environment. With the voting age set to fall to 16 and curriculum reforms not reaching classrooms until September 2028, the next general election will arrive before a single child benefits. We need interim support for schools now.

Shoshana Zuboff captured it precisely, and Lord Puttnam’s committee cited her in 2020:

“It’s down to lawmakers to protect democracy in an age of surveillance … That is the work of the next decade”.

That decade is now. The collapse of public trust we are debating is not a mystery but the predictable consequence of allowing technology to run ahead of accountability, and allowing foreign states to exploit that gap with impunity. We must treat our democratic information environment as the critical infrastructure it is and legislate accordingly. The time for voluntary codes and piecemeal adjustments has definitively passed.